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    • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Lang. Lit. Linguist.
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    • DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL
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HOME > Archives > 2025 > Volume 11 Number 5 (2025) >
IJLLL 2025 Vol.11(5): 238-242
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2025.11.5.608

Corpus-based Translation of Internet Buzzwords: With Guyongzhe as an Example

Ling Jie
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, College of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing City, China
Email: 2391343703@qq.com (L.J.)

Manuscript received June 10, 2025; accepted August 5, 2025; published October 29, 2025.

Abstract—Guyongzhe is not only a hot song but also a hot word on the Internet, but there is no exact or appropriate English expression for it. This study was based on Chinese-English dictionaries and corpora, with corpus linguistics as the theoretical framework, to search, analyze and select the English expressions of Guyongzhe. Because there was no such expression in the dictionary, I turned to COCA and BNC corpus to search based on the definitions of Gu and Yongzhe (database of COCA is five or six times larger than BNC). In this process, I first took Yongzhe as the central word to find some suitable collocation words. Starting from the original meaning of Yongzhe, I found that four nouns, “hero”, “ranger”, “warrior” and “the brave”, were the most suitable. “Lone” was the most common one matched with these four nouns. In contrast, “only”, “sole” and “alone” were associated with these four nouns but none of them conveyed the meaning of Guyongzhe. Later, I found that “single” with “ranger” did not have this meaning, but it collocated with “hero”, which was probably due to the context. Since “lone” was the most collocation with these four nouns, I took Gu, that is, “lone”, as the central word to find appropriate collocations. Finally, the most collocation both in COCA and BNC was “lone ranger”. With this, I went online and searched for a translation of a cover version of Guyongzhe song, which also included “warrior”. Therefore, a more appropriate translation, namely, “lone warrior” was found in this study. The current study gave the solution to the translation of Guyongzhe. To some degree, it spread Chinese culture to the world and promoted cultural exchanges between China and the West.

Keywords—Guyongzhe, corpus, lone

Cite: Ling Jie, "Corpus-based Translation of Internet Buzzwords: With Guyongzhe as an Example," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 238-242, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

 

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